


Long Years, and Dark

by prairiecrow



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Exile, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:29:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oaths, and loyalty, and all we long for that we can never have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Years, and Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Present tense is set shortly after "The Wire".

It had been many long years, and dark, since Elim Garak had walked on the beloved ground of the homeworld he was sworn to serve. Merely sworn? No, his bond with her went far deeper than a few words smoothly spoken in the ruddy glow of the sacred flames: for other men and women, perhaps, their oaths were all that tied them to the Unseen Pattern, but for Garak… well, given his paternal line the Pattern couldn't help but be embedded in him, deeper than his glib tongue and his dangerous gaze — down through flesh and bone, rooted in his heart and that intangible quality some species called "spirit". 

If his father had passed him over entirely, had left him to live out his years as a kitchen servant, Elim would have loved Cardassia no less. But Enabran Tain was nothing if not perceptive. In a contemptible bye-blow he'd recognized a valuable scion, and he'd taken the boy in hand and raised him up from the gutter to stand at his side. Elim, poor and muddy and disreputable by birth, had become Garak, a mystery as polished and perfectly crafted as a  _nirjaka_  blade — and feared, oh yes, and revered, and renowned as a shadow whose ruthless touch no man (or woman, or child) could escape once he'd set his sights upon them.

A devoted servant of Cardassia, that most laudable of mistresses, and in her favour he had looked forward to living to the full whatever years he could carve free in the face of the deadly forces of a universe arrayed against him.

How ironic, then, that the enemy he should have most feared was lurking inside him all along.

So: never again (if Tain's law held good) to breathe the air of Cardassia, to feel her solidity beneath his feet and see the glories of her architecture and her art and her proud wild places. Never again to see his family, either low-caste or noble; never again to stride the stars to hunt and to kill; never again to wield the power of life and death against the enemies of his adored State. No, instead he was forced to content himself with the confines of a single down-at-the-heels space station, and with the humble occupation of watching and reporting to lesser officials (who might not even be reading his accounts) on the dull backwater lives aboard Terok Nor. Worse, his day-to-day existence had narrowed to the consideration of fabrics and patterns, and of the endless repetitive dart and pull of a stitching needle as he created clothing which, while elegant, was also a subtle unending scream of silent despair.

A lesser man would have killed himself under the grinding weight of disgrace and hopelessness. But he was still Garak, the Son of Tain even in exile, and Garak's love for Cardassia could not be so easily extinguished. He had accepted his punishment and continued to serve the State to the best of his ability, using one of his father's gifts — the implant as intimately entwined with his brain as his own blood — to make the agony more bearable when the daily drudgery and the hatred of everyone around him became intolerable.

And then, one day shortly after Federation troops arrived on Deep Space Nine to assist the provisional Bajoran government, the cramped landscape of ugliness and banality had been enlivened with a spot of pure, guileless, amazing beauty. Only a glimpse of a face in a crowd, there and gone — but Garak, as thoroughly trained as he was in the art of hiding every emotion, had found himself staring after the figure in Starfleet medical blue, the lust for the chase awakening in his heart for the first time in over three and a half years. 

The features that had shone across the Promenade were not unknown to him, of course: he'd maintained a back door into the station's database since he'd first arrived, and had read all files pertaining to the Federation personnel joining DS9's crew. In the case of Doctor Julian Subatoi Bashir, however, the reality possessed a magnetism that was lacking in an image on a small screen. It certainly influenced Garak's decision to pick the young physician as his "contact", a move which not only made tactical sense — an impressionable youth might be more easily pumped for information — but also fulfilled a purely personal interest. Garak had absorbed all of the Order's teachings and applied them assiduously, including the policy that passion for another, be it emotional or physical, was a failing that an operative could not afford to indulge… therefore, as lovely as Bashir was, as dearly as the man's earnestness and openness and sensuality invited all sorts of advances, Garak confined himself to spirited intellectual debates and some fairly blatant (from a Cardassian point of view) flirting. He'd judged that the Human wasn't likely to pick up on the cultural cues, and had smugly assured himself that he was fully in control of the situation. 

To the burden of his exile had now been added the additional stressors of cold, of glaring light, and of the loathing and contempt of the numerous Bajoran inhabitants of Deep Space Nine. On the other hand, with the station now in such close proximity to a stable wormhole Garak's backwater assignment had become a matter of some interest to Cardassia, and that brought with it the possibility that he might regain enough political pull to leverage his way out of this hellhole. Things were, incredibly, actually starting to look up…

… for a year, at least. And then his implant, which had been in continuous use for two years, started to break down — and he'd known that his time was about to run out.

The Doctor had figured things out, of course — as naive as he could sometimes be, Bashir was far from stupid. But worse than that, more horrible than the pain and the prospect of death (for what member of the Order worth his salt wasn't prepared to lay down his life at any moment, although Garak had always thought that he'd die in service to Cardassia, and the anguish of that failure ate at his heart more than any), was the fact that the Human refused to leave him alone. The harder Garak pushed, the more vehement his denials and the more evil the content of the various lies he told, the harder Bashir clung, even to the point of following the clue Garak had set in his path without any hope of it being pursued, and going to the Arawath colony to confront Tain himself. Garak had slept through it all, releasing his grip on consciousness with no expectation of ever waking again. Bashir's forgiveness had followed him into the darkness, his lone companion on his final journey. Of all the things he'd expected to feel at the end of his life, gratitude was the least likely emotion he'd have anticipated.

Bashir had awakened him by taking his hand, only the second time he'd been touched with kindness in all the course of his exile. When he saw the Doctor standing over him, smiling and reassuring him that he was going to be all right, Garak had closed his eyes and felt something new penetrate him, flowing down into him from those warm dark eyes and the fingers entwined with his: a thing fresh and full of life, winding itself around his cold bones and tightening with the tenacity of a delicate  _xirotha_  vine. It took root in him easily, this bond that united them, because he'd already been nourishing it for over a year.

Dispassionately he calculated the factors before him. Cardassia had cast him aside, and Tain had made it clear that he was never coming home. His devotion to the Unseen Pattern still lived, but it had dried to ironwood and had borne no fruit for so long that he was starving in its shadow. And now, this: a beautiful apple laid in his hand, golden and fragrant, inviting him to taste and be satisfied.

It was passion that made his decision for him, between one heartbeat and the next. The choice to live had not been his, but the life that lay before him was his to mould as best he might. Son of Tain and agent of terror that he'd once been, he was not made of stone. 

Not any more.

He'd bided his time — not very long, scarcely a Bajoran week — before making his move in an isolated corridor of the habitat ring. The easy words of their argument faltered and died on Bashir's lips as Garak's hand slid over the small of his back, but the boy had turned at once to face him, hazel eyes wide and shy and inviting. Fierce triumph filled Garak's darkened heart as Bashir yielded to the pressure of his touch, moving up against him; his taller and more slender body shivered once, like a  _his'selet_  sapling in the first winds of spring, and for an instant Garak clearly remembered the scent of that long-lost tree, white and sweet.

And then Bashir kissed him, filling him with the taste of his Human mouth and the alien perfume of his caramel skin, with the vibrant force of youth and desire and hope — 

— and for the first time in nearly five long, dark years, Garak utterly forgot all that he'd lost in the face of the promise of the present.

THE END


End file.
